Law Commons^™

Commonwealth And Commodity: Shakespeare's "King John", Robert J. Delahunty

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

Part I begins, as does KJ itself, with the French ambassador questioning the King’s legitimacy, and continues with a dispute between two brothers over their inheritance. The problem of just title reverberates throughout the play. Part II explores the development and moral growth of Philip Falconbridge/Sir Richard Plantagenet—“The Bastard”—the play’s central character and if there is one, its hero. Part III analyzes the two concepts whose polar opposition structures the play: “commonwealth” and “commodity.” The contrast between these two ideas is found elsewhere in Tudor literature, but Shakespeare gives it a new resonance and depth. The service of one …

Aquinas's Prohibition Of Killing Reconsidered, John Makdisi

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

St. Thomas Aquinas speaks to the heart of what it means to be human in our relationship with God when he expounds the way of the moral life in his Summa Theologiae. A classic example of the depth of his understanding is evident in his treatment of acts that knowingly kill. His style of writing is succinct and sometimes his ideas are distributed among several texts, but one can mine the riches of his thought with patient reading and reflection. This Article focuses exclusively on the extreme case where a person is certain to die if nothing is …

Legal Sets, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

In this Article, I propose that the practices of legal reasoning and analysis are helpfully understood as being primarily concerned not with rules or propositions, but with sets. This Article develops a formal model of the role of sets in the practices of legal actors in a common-law system defined by a recursive relationship between cases and rules. In doing so, it demonstrates how conceiving of legal doctrines as a universe of discourse comprising (sometimes nested or overlapping) sets of cases can clarify the logical structure that governs marginal cases and help organize the available options for resolving such cases …